Читать книгу The Conquest - Eva Emery Dye - Страница 10

Kindred spirits came to Clark—Bowman, Helm, Harrod and their friends, tall riflemen with long buckhorn-handled hunting-knives, enlisting for the west, but no one guessing their destination.

Despite remonstrances twenty pioneer families on their flat-boats at Redstone-Old-Fort joined their small fleet to his. "We, too, are going to Kentucky."

Jumping in as the last boat pulled out of Pittsburg, Captain William Linn handed Clark a letter. He broke the seal.

"Ye gods, the very stars are for us! The French have joined America!"

With strange exhilaration the little band felt themselves borne down the swift-rushing waters to the Falls of the Ohio.

Before them blossomed a virgin world. Clark paused while the boats clustered round. "Do you see that high, narrow, rocky island at the head of the rapids? It is safe from the Indian. While the troops erect a stockade and blockhouse, let the families clear a field and plant their corn."

Axes rang. The odour of hawthorn filled the air. Startled birds swept over the falls—eagles, sea gulls, and mammoth cranes turning up their snowy wings glittering in the sunlight. On the mainland, deer, bear, and buffalo roamed under the sycamores serene as in Eden.

"Halloo-oo!" It was the well-known call of Simon Kenton, paddling down to Corn Island with Captain John Montgomery and thirty Kentuckians.

"What news of the winter?"

"Boone and twenty-seven others have been captured by the Indians."

"Boone? We are laying a trap for those very Indians," and then and there Major Clark announced the object of the expedition.

Some cheered the wild adventure, some trembled and deserted in the night, but one hundred and eighty men embarked with no baggage beyond a rifle and a wallet of corn for each.

The snows of the Alleghanies were melting. A million rivulets leaped to the blue Ohio. It was the June rise, the river was booming. Poling his little flotilla out into the main channel Clark and his borderers shot the rapids at the very moment that the sun veiled itself in an all but total eclipse at nine o'clock in the morning.

It was a dramatic dash, as on and on he sped down the river, bank-full, running like a millrace.